Puppet is shaking up its product strategy, announcing on Wednesday the first product that will become part of an expanded portfolio of DevOps-oriented products.

Puppet Discovery allows companies to take inventory of all technology assets and services in use across on-premises servers and public clouds, which is a harder problem than you might think. In an era where cloud services have never been easier to sign up for and get started with just a credit card, there are lots of companies with recurring charges for experimental development projects that never wound up going anywhere, and managing that sprawl can involve a lot of manual labor.

Discovery can be installed within your environment and it will create a dashboard showing all services running across your network, according to Puppet. That will make it easier to shut down services that are out of date, patch other services that you need but forgot about, and make decisions about capacity planning when it becomes available in May.

The Portland-based startup is also making a few changes to its flagship Puppet Enterprise product, which helps companies modernize their software development practices by allowing them to ship software more frequently. Puppet’s whole pitch is that it allows you to automate parts of the software development process that previously required a lot of manual labor, and new features in Puppet Enterprise include role-based access control settings and continuous delivery features that are the fruit of its acquisition of Seattle startup Distelli last year.

As newer software development technologies like containers and serverless computing have captured the attention of forward-looking software development teams, companies that might once have used Puppet’s tools to modernize their infrastructure suddenly have a wealth of options to accelerate and streamline their software-development process. It’s not entirely clear how that is affecting Puppet’s business prospects, but talk in 2015 of a potential IPO clearly hasn’t materialized three years later, and the company laid off three percent of its workforce earlier this month.

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Tom Krazit, GeekWire's Cloud & Enterprise Editor, covered technology for news organizations including IDG, CNET, and paidContent before serving as executive editor of Gigaom and the Structure conference series. Reach him at tom@geekwire.com and follow him @tomkrazit.

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